At Bourbach-le-Haut, Lieutenant Lavallée was to invite a last mayor to partake of the trip to Paris, and hunt up some remaining veterans. Whatever gentle thirst I had had for mayors and veterans being now quite slaked, I went to the little church, instead of to the _Mairie_. Through the half-open door came light and chanting sounds. I went in to find a dim interior, with an ancient arch framing the altar space, in front of which was a narrow, black coffin. Only some very old bit of mortality, waxy and shrunken, could lie within. Women, children, and what may have been veterans were saying the rosary in German—the Sorrowful Mysteries—and I thought on my dead, and on that dear and holy brother born into the world on this day long years ago. In Alsace he had desired and received, dreaming and adolescent, the baptismal waters. Sadness invaded me, even as the dreary night was invading the day, and I would have groaned aloud, but I saw Lieutenant Lavallée standing by me. Haunted by the mournful chanting, with its mysterious indications, “_Jetz und in der Stunde unseres Absterbens, Amen_,” I passed out into falling night and rain; dark masses of mountain loomed up, lighter spaces were the stretching valleys. Soon we found ourselves on the deep road to Masevaux, I lonelier than the loneliest of the dark and hurrying clouds. IV THANN AND OLD THANN _Sunday morning, November 3d._—Awakened at six by heavy firing. After wondering what could be happening, I remember that life, as far as I am concerned, is for the moment largely joy, or rather joyous riding, with a series of agreeable French officers (they certainly are of an amiability!), in a series of large, powerful military motors, through a series of beautiful autumnal hills, over a series of the newest and most wonderful of war roads. Enough church-going, however, as will have been noticed, to keep me mindful that man, and woman, too, is grass, and though it, or rather she, springs up in the morning, she may be cut down by night, and that this bending of the hills is by the journeys of her eternity. Well, to get to the point, or rather to Thann. We started out early, at nine, for I was to find a Mass in the cathedral, after which we were to proceed to Vieux Thann, where war has not spared the church nor left worshipers. Again we took the screened road overhanging the valley. Again we stopped on an eminence and climbed into a field, and again I was shown the blue valley, over the tops of some red cherry trees. Nothing detached itself from gradations of velvety mists and beaming distances, but I knew that on the grape-planted slopes of an unseen river that other wine of defeat was being drunk from cups held stiffly to unwilling lips. [Illustration: THANN AND ITS VINEYARDS]